Friday, March 5, 2010

Cramer Quotes

"Lesson number one: When it comes to buying or selling a stock, don't tell me where you bought it, tell me where it's going. That's all that matters."

"Lesson number two: Always use limit orders. Only amateurs and fools enter market orders... Never use market orders, ever!"

"Keep up on your stocks... The problem isn't the time. It's the desire to do the work. You have to ask yourself whether you like this stuff enough to stay on top of it."

"Ignorance - and the buy and hold pattern it instills - is not bliss."

"The biggest rewards come from identifying stocks of unknown companies at the beginning of their journey, whe they might be worth no more than a hundred million dollars and are undiscovered, unknown, unloved, and most important, uncovered by Wall Street."

"There are no asterisks in this game. You can't say, Well, I would have had a great year if it weren't for WorldCom.. or Enron."

"The key to balance sheet analysis is to figure out what kind of interest the company has to pay each year on its equivalent of a mortgage it might have taken out."

"There are always unknowable facts in the investment process. Always. But we can;t let them undermine judgment to the point that judgments can't be made."

"I am trying to get you to buy stocks that go up quickly, in a time frame that matters to you now, and get you to avoid stocks that go down rapidly, that could wipe you out.... I don't care how we catch the moves... I just want us to catch the darned moves."

"This [is] the best house in a bad neighborhood thesis: No company, no matter how good, can truly transcend its sector."

"You must never forget that these are [just] pieces of paper. Pieces of paper can go down the drain as quickly as toilet paper if they are the wrong ones, or we get into the wrong market."

"Investing [is] a much more lonely and difficult process than most people think. You have to love stocks when people hate them, you have to leave stocks when people love them."

"I know human behavior. I know what happens in real life when you ignore the playbook, when you stick with the so-called secular growth stocks while the elephants are dancing to the cyclical tune. What happens is you panic. You sell at the worst time, the bottom. You bail."

"The stock market is not a science. It is just a humbling collection of pricing decisions involving the supply of equities and a level of demand mitigated by greed and fear."

"On Wall Street, we care about growth, growth, and more growth... Nothing trumps growth."

"While I accept the simple equation that E x M = P, I refuse to be bounded by it."

"The M anticipates the E."

"If you are going to buy stock in a business, you must find out what metrics [in that sector] are important."

"The market cares more about future growth than it does about past growth."

"That's right, all the way down [the analysts] kept reinterating their buys, saying how cheap the stock is, trapping you in [it] for the horrible slide. But at the bottom, they cut their numbers... and take the stock to a hold or a sell. That's precisely the moment I cover my shorts or begin to buy. How do I know when to get off? I sell it when all of the analysts love it again."

"If they [big market particpants] even smell [Fed interest] rate hikes, they are going to sell whole groups because they anticipate decline in the economy... when these elephants move, they move stocks with them. To ignore their activities - especially when they are so easily predicted and anticipated - is a tremendous waste of money for all investors."

"A chart is never enough to buy a stock from. Never. Don't be conned into believing that looking at a chart can suffice for homework; it simply can't."

"I am always on the hunt for damaged stocks where the merchandise underneath isn;t that badly damaged... Not damaged companies, but damaged stock prices."

"You have to be willing to change your mind and your direction. Nowhere in the commandments of investing is it written, One shall not change one's mind even if it may be wrong."

"The reason I failed so dramatically when I first bought stocks is that I, like everyone else who has ever bought a stock... foolishly believed in [these] three rules: (1) Buy and hold because that's how you make the most money, (2) trading is always wrong, owning is always right, and (3) Speculation is the height of evil.

"If you chose to never sell becasue, say, you are afraid of the tax man, or because you despise paying commissions, you need to get your head examined."

"Approach it like a job. Investing can be a hobby, but trading can't."

"The saving grace of stocks is that they can only go to zero. Don't laugh. I've owned some stocks that were so bad that it was a blessing that they stopped at zero."

"They irrationally fear the losses that could come from the single-digit stocks that don't make it; they act as if stocks can go to minus something."

"I don't care about the past, I don't care about where you bought the stock, the only thing I care about with a stock is what's going to happen next. Most people don't grasp this simple concept."

"We can anticipate what the crowd wants, the chattering classes, those people who can't control themselves because they think that every idea is the next Microsft or Amgen... My method expploits the crowd's inability to distinguish a 10x idea from a lot of ideas that just fizzle and gets you in and out before the fizzling starts.""

"Speculating, particularly when you are younger, is not only prudent, it is essential."

"You have to be prepared to love the stocks at one moment and leave them unmercifully the next. You may have to flip on a dime. Flexibility is everything when you trade these kinds of [red hot] names."

"Why is the investing intelligensia so unwilling to embrace a Game Breaker strategy? I think it is because such a strategy involves two decisions, a buy and a sell. The traditional... approach to investing, which I scorn, simply doesn't consider any purchase of a stock that requires a later sell as part of the investment process."

"I am neither a bear nor a bull, I am an agnostic opportunist. I want to make money short- and long-term. I want to find good situations and exploit them. "

"I got in the business because Lynch said you didn't have to go to Harvard Business School to be in the business, that you could pick stocks. Lynch gave me hope that amateurs could turn pro. "

"I think there are a thousand stocks out there that could make you rich, totally independent of what you do for a living. "

"The people who are buying stocks just because they're going up, and they don't know what the company does, deserve to lose money. "

"I'm not smarter than the market, but I can recognize a good tape and a bad tape. I recognize when it's right and when it's wrong and that's what my strength is. "

"It's the most objective industry in the world. If your numbers stink, you're out. If your numbers are good, you get more money. It's... Darwinian, it's beautiful, it's brutal, it works. "

"I think that stocks have been this tremendous, tremendous equalizer for people in this country. Guys who can't make a lot of money at their jobs have been able to make a lot of money in the stock market. "

"My advantage is that I'm very good at interpreting the information. "

"You'll do as well as most professionals. Most professionals don't beat the market. Let's not over-rate my industry."

"Peter Lynch made me a lot of money. So I like him. I had my IRA with him when I was making $125 a week as a cub reporter. He made me more money than I made in my job."

"We are all wrong so often that it amazes me that we can have any conviction at all over the direction of things to come. But we must. "

No comments:

Post a Comment